56 replies to this topic

[veecee]

Recently I whiled away an hour or so poking through the websites of some Canadian BigLaw firms to check out if they have a preference for grads from particular schools. Rifling through a few posts on this forum, it became clear that I wasn't the only person doing this. In fact, it's more or less the methodology that Macleans uses to create their elite firm hiring ranking (hah).

While I don't believe that such information is particularly important, and I certainly wouldn't say it's a good basis for picking a law school, I can't deny that I find it quite interesting. That being the case, I whipped up a quick bit of software which culled data (region, school, year, position) from the websites from 14 of Canada's largest law firms - this data can be found via the link at the bottom of this post.

Canadian BigLaw hiring stats (not to be used in deciding between law schools)

Hope you like it, folks!

Note - there are plenty of flaws with this data, how it was collected, and how it is presented. I know.

[pk_00]

According to the stats for Calgary (the city), it seems Calgary law holds its own quite well against Alberta.

125 vs. 172 total, given that Calgary only expanded to 110 students in 09 (or 08?), Calgary has been graduating roughly 100 less students a year than Alberta, and given that the Calgary firms still have associates and partners (16 in total) who graduated from UofA before 1978 (before Calgary law's first graduating class), I'd say that Calgary is doing quite well, maybe better, at least in terms of those firms.

[Lt-smash7]

That is Toronto Heavy Damn.

[schroed]

Lt-smash7 said:

That is Toronto Heavy Damn.

Yeah...wow...

[veecee]

pk_00 said:

I'd say that Calgary is doing quite well, maybe better, at least in terms of those firms.

I'm inclined to agree, although this appears to be something that cropped up in the last few years, so it will be interesting to see if the trend continues.

Lt-smash7 said:

That is Toronto Heavy Damn.

Not sure if you mean UofT heavy or city of Toronto heavy, but either way - yup.

I found the differences between this data and the Macleans elite firm hiring rankings to be of interest as well:

veecee - Macleans

1. Toronto - Toronto
2. McGill - New Brunswick
3. Osgoode - McGill
4. Western - Manitoba
5. Queens - Western, Saskatchewan
6. British Columbia
7. Alberta - Alberta
8. Dalhousie - Dalhousie
9. Ottawa - Calgary
10. Calgary - Osgoode
11. Victoria - British Columbia
12. Windsor - Queens
13. Saskatchewan - Ottawa
14. Manitoba - Victoria
15. New Brunswick - Windsor

[Lionel.Hutz]

Awesome work bro.

Thanks a lot...it provides a lot of insight.

[veecee]

Lionel.Hutz said:

Awesome work bro. Thanks a lot...it provides a lot of insight.

No worries! Glad to know that others find it interesting.

[schroed]

Yeah, thanks for doing that. You're right in that it's not a way to decide between schools, but it's neat to mull over that sort of info while we all wait to see where we end up.

[Error01]

I’m really glad you put this together. Awesome work

The first thing that I did was paste it in Excel and sort by ratio. I see that you have posted that ranking above.

My only question is what criteria was use for selecting the 14 firms that you used? One option would have been to go by the Canadian Lawyer (I think) magazine’s list of the 20 largest firms.

Edit: I see that you have said the largest. Do you think it would have made much of a difference if you had included more firms?

[Error01]

This also says something about the relative size of Canada’s legal markets if you look at the city totals.

1. Toronto: 2675
2. Calgary: 667
3. Montreal: 522
4. Vancouver: 511
5. Ottawa: 279
6. Edmonton: 119

Calgary is now the second largest legal market in Canada, but Toronto is apparently still over four times as large. Although, I suspect that Quebec’s biglaw firms are fairly decoupled from the firms that serve the rest of Canada because it’s a civil law jurisdiction. There are probably some firms with large offices in Montreal not making the list because they don’t have a large presence in the rest of Canada.

[Mandrake]

Looking at the Lexpert list of largest firms, if you get down to 20th you pull in a couple of Atlantic regional firms. That would likely change the numbers for UNB and Dal fairly substantially. Whether it would make the list more or less relevant to most of the people on the board is a reasonable question.

[Error01]

School/#Assoc./Size/ Ratio
1.Toronto/ 270/ 194/ 1.391752577
2.McGill/ 218/ 170/ 1.282352941
3.Western/ 192/ 175/ 1.097142857
4.Osgoode/ 307/ 290/ 1.05862069
5.Queens / 162/ 164/ 0.987804878
6.British / 162/ 180/ 0.9
Totals / 2061/ 2514/ 0.819809069
7.Calgary/ 89/ 110/ 0.809090909
8.Alberta / 127/ 175/ 0.725714286
9.Ottawa / 181/ 260/ 0.696153846
10.Dalhousie/ 110/ 163/ 0.674846626
11.Victoria/ 72/ 109/ 0.660550459
12.Windsor/ 97/ 210/ 0.461904762
13.Saskatchewan/ 36/ 126/ 0.285714286
14.Manitoba/ 23/ 106/ 0.216981132
15.New/ 15/ 82/ 0.182926829


Look what happens when you rank by ratio and only include associates. This may make more sense because partnerships decisions probably have next to nothing to do with what school someone went to.

Western moves up to third. Calgary moves ahead of Alberta into 7th place.

[veecee]

Error01 said:

Do you think it would have made much of a difference if you had included more firms?

1) I culled data from the seven sisters first, and then worked my way down the Lexpert list. I skipped Borden, Canada's largest firm, due to the fact that their website proved a nuisance to my software.

2) I think that I've done the maritime schools a slight disservice by skipping out on Atlantic firms. This would certainly improve their placement ratios. That said, even if every lawyer at those firms was a UNB grad, it still wouldn't justify the Macleans rankings.

3) The stats are deceptive when it comes to the size of the Montreal legal market, because I've only included those grads from institutions which grant common law degrees. Thus, a fairer comparison would put Montreal at 1077 grads to Calgary's 700 and Toronto's 2828. I went with the truncated stats for the sake of ease - the full stats are here.

[ihaveseoul]

Love the info. And HUGE kudos to veecee for taking the time to do all this up.

One slight change: U of C numbers are supposed to be 100. (Changed 3 years ago as this is the first year of ~300 in the Faculty).

[Mal]

ihaveseoul said:

Love the info. And HUGE kudos to veecee for taking the time to do all this up.

One slight change: U of C numbers are supposed to be 100. (Changed 3 years ago as this is the first year of ~300 in the Faculty).

On the UofC note: it is actually better than the numbers suggest here because it is a fairly recent school. So the number of partners at the firms is lower than it should be simply because there aren't as many people alumni.

I also really like these numbers :).

[widget]

The difference from the MacLean's numbers is that MacLeans looks at the largest firms in the region. When you factor in Atlantic Canada's big three law firms, the numbers get thrown a bit. This works to the advantage of single-school markets (Winnipeg, Saskatchewan) and Atlantic Canada.

I did only a cursory search, out of curiosity, and only looked at Dal and UNB, but came up with some numbers:

Cox & Palmer
UNB:
Associates: 36
Partners: 44

Dal:
Associates: 16
Partners: 46

Stewart McKelvey:
UNB: 80 lawyers total (couldn't break them down without reading individual profiles)
Dal: 101 lawyers total.

McInnes Cooper doesn't let you search by school and some profiles don't indicate where the lawyer went to school.

If you add those numbers into the table, UNB's total number goes up to 205 and Dal's goes up to 400, with ratios of 2.5 and 2.46, respectively. But if you do that, you'd have to do that for Winnipeg and Saskatchewan's biglaw community, and also have to figure out what McInnes Cooper's stats are.

All in all, though, I suppose it's a useful table if you're looking at working at those particular firms in general Canadian biglaw.

[ihaveseoul]

widget: I understand your POV and it is entirely valid. However, would also have to include firms like BD&P in Calgary, AHB&L in Van... etc. etc. Not sure how significant the change would be if you include all of the large-regionals... perhaps another data-collection/separate list that includes Bigs with Large Regionals. It is an interesting process.

[widget]

Agreed, seoul. You'd have to make some adjustment for it, for sure. Like, say, limiting it to law firms that have 100+ lawyers or the five largest firms per region/province. My previous post only explains some difference in how MacLeans arrived at its numbers, and why this category, in general, is a difficult one to calculate. Taking Canada's largest firms skews toward Bay Street and larger cities. Taking the region/province's largest firms skews toward the smaller local schools. Taking all firms with a cutoff point of # of lawyers may come up with some different numbers entirely, but would probably involve a lot more calculation. BigLaw has a different meaning in different places.

[Mal]

I support what widget is saying. That there is value in how each school does in its market of larger firms.

My biggest problem with the Macleans ranking is the optics of it. They don't specifically say what they are doing with the elite firm measure, and to me "elite firms" doesn't simply mean "large firms in their markets". When I think of elite I think of the seven sister, and competitor firms.

[Pyke]

Mal said:

I support what widget is saying. That there is value in how each school does in its market of larger firms.

My biggest problem with the Macleans ranking is the optics of it. They don't specifically say what they are doing with the elite firm measure, and to me "elite firms" doesn't simply mean "large firms in their markets". When I think of elite I think of the seven sister, and competitor firms.

True, but this can be a flawed metric. What about elite boutique firms, like Lenczner Slaght? The students who accepted positions at that firm could just have easily accepted positions at firms like Blakes, if that's what they wanted.

The concept of "elite firms" is somewhat problematic - because it begets the question, elite at "what"? The top boutique firms in Toronto pay the same (at least, initially) as any of the "big law" firms out there.

[artsydork]

Or, you know, perpetrates the concept that (large) firm culture is the strongest indicator of success in the legal world.

I wonder which school has the largest penis size average because really, this is what this is turning into.

[Mandrake]

And that would only manage to slight the firms that manage to retain the most females. A pickle if ever there was one.

[pk_00]

Error01 said:

School/#Assoc./Size/ Ratio
1.Toronto/ 270/ 194/ 1.391752577
2.McGill/ 218/ 170/ 1.282352941
3.Western/ 192/ 175/ 1.097142857
4.Osgoode/ 307/ 290/ 1.05862069
5.Queens / 162/ 164/ 0.987804878
6.British / 162/ 180/ 0.9
Totals / 2061/ 2514/ 0.819809069
7.Calgary/ 89/ 110/ 0.809090909
8.Alberta / 127/ 175/ 0.725714286
9.Ottawa / 181/ 260/ 0.696153846
10.Dalhousie/ 110/ 163/ 0.674846626
11.Victoria/ 72/ 109/ 0.660550459
12.Windsor/ 97/ 210/ 0.461904762
13.Saskatchewan/ 36/ 126/ 0.285714286
14.Manitoba/ 23/ 106/ 0.216981132
15.New/ 15/ 82/ 0.182926829


Look what happens when you rank by ratio and only include associates. This may make more sense because partnerships decisions probably have next to nothing to do with what school someone went to.

Western moves up to third. Calgary moves ahead of Alberta into 7th place.

Calgary's ratio would move even higher when you take into consideration that there's only been one year of data where Calgary has graduated more than 75 students. 2010 was the first year Calgary graduated more than 75 students (and won't be graduating a class of 110 students till 2013). Replace "110" with "75" and Calgary moves up to 3rd, after Toronto and McGill.


1.Toronto/ 270/ 194/ 1.391752577
2.McGill/ 218/ 170/ 1.282352941
3.Calgary/ 89/ 75/ 1.186666666666667
4..Western/ 192/ 175/ 1.097142857
5.Osgoode/ 307/ 290/ 1.05862069
6.Queens / 162/ 164/ 0.987804878
7.British / 162/ 180/ 0.9
Totals / 2061/ 2514/ 0.819809069
8.Alberta / 127/ 175/ 0.725714286
9.Ottawa / 181/ 260/ 0.696153846
10.Dalhousie/ 110/ 163/ 0.674846626
11.Victoria/ 72/ 109/ 0.660550459
12.Windsor/ 97/ 210/ 0.461904762
13.Saskatchewan/ 36/ 126/ 0.285714286
14.Manitoba/ 23/ 106/ 0.216981132
15.New/ 15/ 82/ 0.182926829

[Error01]

pk_00 said:

Error01 said:

School/#Assoc./Size/ Ratio
1.Toronto/ 270/ 194/ 1.391752577
2.McGill/ 218/ 170/ 1.282352941
3.Western/ 192/ 175/ 1.097142857
4.Osgoode/ 307/ 290/ 1.05862069
5.Queens / 162/ 164/ 0.987804878
6.British / 162/ 180/ 0.9
Totals / 2061/ 2514/ 0.819809069
7.Calgary/ 89/ 110/ 0.809090909
8.Alberta / 127/ 175/ 0.725714286
9.Ottawa / 181/ 260/ 0.696153846
10.Dalhousie/ 110/ 163/ 0.674846626
11.Victoria/ 72/ 109/ 0.660550459
12.Windsor/ 97/ 210/ 0.461904762
13.Saskatchewan/ 36/ 126/ 0.285714286
14.Manitoba/ 23/ 106/ 0.216981132
15.New/ 15/ 82/ 0.182926829


Look what happens when you rank by ratio and only include associates. This may make more sense because partnerships decisions probably have next to nothing to do with what school someone went to.

Western moves up to third. Calgary moves ahead of Alberta into 7th place.

Calgary's ratio would move even higher when you take into consideration that there's only been one year of data where Calgary has graduated more than 75 students. 2010 was the first year Calgary graduated more than 75 students (and won't be graduating a class of 110 students till 2013). Replace "110" with "75" and Calgary moves up to 3rd, after Toronto and McGill.


1.Toronto/ 270/ 194/ 1.391752577
2.McGill/ 218/ 170/ 1.282352941
3.Calgary/ 89/ 75/ 1.186666666666667
4..Western/ 192/ 175/ 1.097142857
5.Osgoode/ 307/ 290/ 1.05862069
6.Queens / 162/ 164/ 0.987804878
7.British / 162/ 180/ 0.9
Totals / 2061/ 2514/ 0.819809069
8.Alberta / 127/ 175/ 0.725714286
9.Ottawa / 181/ 260/ 0.696153846
10.Dalhousie/ 110/ 163/ 0.674846626
11.Victoria/ 72/ 109/ 0.660550459
12.Windsor/ 97/ 210/ 0.461904762
13.Saskatchewan/ 36/ 126/ 0.285714286
14.Manitoba/ 23/ 106/ 0.216981132
15.New/ 15/ 82/ 0.182926829

That’s a fairly aggressive assumption, but I agree that it makes sense to give Calgary a boast. It makes me a little less comfortable with going to U of A. U of A still has higher admission standards, and it’s my belief that that is what drives graduate marketability in the long run. (But this is kind of like saying that purchasing power dictates exchange rates in the long run — it definitely doesn’t have to hold in short run, other factors, etc.) I guess that in this case U of A’s admission standard advantage has been overwhelmed by Calgary’s proximity to Calgary’s hot legal market. It is probably still the case that U of A has better reach outside of the province though.

[pk_00]

Given Calgary's 'holistic' admissions process, I'm not sure it makes sense to compare the two solely on numbers. I mean, McGill also has lower admission numbers relative to how they perform in the legal market, but their graduate marketability hasn't really been adversely affected by this.

[Mal]

I don't see how using the 75 over 110 number for Calgary is an aggressive assumption.

I would expect Calgarys employment numbers to be exceptional (top3 wouldn't surprise me). A big part of employment is (A) location and (B) size of a school. It is much easier for UofC to market its 100ish students in Calgary than it is for Alberta to market its 180ish students between Edmonton/Calgary even if you accept that Alberta is a better school.

I have said over and over again I think that Alberta is a significantly better school academically. But I would be very hesitant in choosing UofA over UofC if I wanted to stay in Alberta. If I was choosing between the two schools today, the dominant consideration would be where I wanted to spend 3 years (both in terms of city, and in terms of the different social make-ups of the schools -- personally on that criteria I think Calgary wins).

[Error01]

Did they actually increase the class size from 75 to 110 and then reduce it back to 75 again, or was the reduction from 110 by a lesser amount? I said that 75 was an aggressive assumption because I wasn’t sure that the class size had been reduced by the full amount and because the school has expressed plans to increase class sizes again in the future. It’s not a terrible assumption though.

Mal: Could you elaborate on your city and social make-up point? I’m guessing that you are saying that you would prefer living in Calgary to Edmonton. How do you think the two schools compare in terms of social make-up (in your opinion). I had heard that U of A had a relatively younger student body which would appeal to me because I am coming directly from undergrad.

[confusedlawyer]

Not looking too good for Windsor.

[Mal]

Error01 said:

Did they actually increase the class size from 75 to 110 and then reduce it back to 75 again, or was the reduction from 110 by a lesser amount? I said that 75 was an aggressive assumption because I wasn’t sure that the class size hand been reduced by the full amount and because the school has expressed plans to increase class sizes again in the future. It’s not a terrible assumption though.

Mal: Could you elaborate on your city and social make-up point? I’m guessing that you are saying that you would prefer living in Calgary to Edmonton. How do you think the two schools compare in terms of social make-up. I had heard that U of A had a relatively younger student body which would appeal to me because I am coming directly from undergrad.

Sure, it is not just the youth of the student body but how social/friendly they are. Calgary holistic admissions favors not only older applicants but more involved applicants. Involved people have a tendency to be really outgoing, and friendly. They also tend to be lower key, more interesting, and more fun to spend time with. This combined with a smaller school produces a open, close knit community.

Point in fact: Mal. I am a unfriendly grouch, who never would have been admitted to UofC despite the fact that I would have dominated the class academically (both based on law performance and last2/lsat factors). Schools that admit less jerks like myself are nicer to be in.

[RBK]

U of A students are very involved what are you talking about?